Optimizing accuracy and efficiency in real-time people counting with cascaded object detection

Abstract Growing concerns about public safety have driven the demand for real-time surveillance, particularly in monitoring systems like people counters. Traditional methods heavily reliant on facial detection face challenges due to the complex nature of facial features. This paper presents an innovative people counting system known for its robustness, utilizing holistic bodily characteristics for improved detection and tallying. This system achieves exceptional performance through advanced computer vision techniques, with a flawless accuracy and precision rate of 100% under ideal conditions. Even in challenging visual conditions, it maintains an impressive overall accuracy of 98.42% and a precision of 97.51%. Comprehensive analyses, including violin plot and heatmaps, support this outstanding performance. Additionally, by assessing accuracy and execution time concerning the number of cascading stages, we highlight the significant advantages of our approach. Experimentation with the TUD-Pedestrian dataset demonstrates an accuracy of 94.2%. Evaluation using the UCFCC dataset further proves the effectiveness of our approach in handling diverse scenarios, showcasing its robustness in real-world crowd counting applications. Compared to benchmark approaches, our proposed system demonstrates real-time precision and efficiency.